04. The Christ in the Modern World
CHAPTER IV THE CHRIST IN THE MODERN WORLD IN his History of Doctrine, Professor Hagenbach makes a five-fold division of the course pursued by Christian thought from its beginning. First in order was “The Age of Apologetics,” when the infant Ecclesia was chiefly concerned for the defense of the Faith against its Pagan opponents. Next came “The Age of Polemics,” during which the Church established by the Emperor Constantine’s edict devoted herself to the formulation of her doctrines. “The Age of Systematic Theology” which largely influenced the modern period followed that of “Polemics” and deserves more than casual mention. It was developed by the keen and logical cogitations of the Schoolmen, whose theological reign extended from the ninth to the end of the fifteenth century. They [in], made a praiseworthy attempt to reconcile the dogmas of faith with the dictates of reason, setting up an all-inclusive system on the supposition that the creed of the Church was the one reality capable of rationalization. As the product of Christian intellectualism, Scholasticism acted under the Aristotelian method, and was governed by the assumption that all phenomena must be understood from and toward theology. The early Fathers had bequeathed their successors a closely articulated, comprehensive body of dogma, and a philosophical apparatus which determined and shaped its content. Once the Schoolmen realized the nature of this bequest, they endeavored to recover the spirit of inquiry that lay behind its results. The Church consequently entered almost automatically upon another era of strain and conflict, intensified by the previous organization and concurrent growth of the Papacy, which had reinforced the predicates of catholicity, authority and dogma, and the paramountcy of their spiritual claims.
Although St. Augustine’s influence was regnant in Scholasticism, Erigena, one of its first representatives, was a Neo-Platbnist and a Mystic rather than a typical Schoolman.
Roscelinus, Anselm, William of Champeaux, and his pupil Abelard belong to its first period, which terminated with the twelfth century. The prominent figures of the second period were Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. In so far as the term science is applicable to their meditations, for them and their disciples it consisted almost exclusively of divinity.
Doubtless they reasoned in a circle, since they set out on their quest with inherited convictions they were determined to substantiate.
Many of their arguments may seem frivolous and barren to Modernists, who accuse them of fabricating absurd problems and wasting endless pains upon their solution. Yet jibes are meaningless when flung at able and dedicated men, who gave practical proof of their unsurpassed eagerness in thinking, and exhibited an intrepid energy in subjecting to thought what ever they deemed essential to its dominion. NOT should it be forgotten that the Schoolmen were also the Modernists of their age: bold and advanced spirits whose work could not be canceled without a break in the continuity of Christian thinking and achievement. Our political, ethical and religious ideas and institutions have been constructed in part out of the material these mediaeval quarrymen excavated with prodigious toil. If its results were not effective in enriching knowledge, they certainly strengthened the reasoning faculties of the future, and prepared them for their arduous tasks. In summary, the mission of the Scholastics expanded and invigorated the human mind until the limitless realms of the natural sciences were opened to its researches. When that mission ended, it was succeeded by the Renaissance which ushered in the freedom and the methods of organized knowledge.
“The Age of Conflict and Confessions” covered the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its developments show that Protestantism was at odds not only with the Roman See, but within itself; and the severity of its internal separations is evidenced by Schaff’s third volume on The Creeds of Christendom. In Hagenbach’s scheme, “The Age of Criticism” comes last. It began in the latter half of the eighteenth century and persists to the present. The advance, on the one hand, of the natural sciences, and on the other, of historical and Biblical criticism, dismayed theological orthodoxy, jealous as it was for the preservation of those doctrinal formulas which now seemed to be threatened with dissolution.
Here the poets enter the scene. They are usually the best interpreters of their age; alive alike to its hopes and fears,and sensitive to those subtler movements of the Time Spirit, which so often escape the notice of partisans.
Arthur Hugh Clough gave up the whole problem of faith’s reconciliation with knowledge, yet still clung to faith in blank bewilderment, and affirmed, “Christ is not dead.” Tennyson ultimately succeeded in reaching a stage where faith was the one “beam in darkness,” which we must “let grow.” Browning’s optimism, so often lauded, was at times too insistent to be convincing. Matthew Arnold may be described as “faint, yet pursuing.” At his critical hour he was dejectedly Wandering between two worlds, One dead, the other powerless to be born.
He distilled through his compositions a stoical resignation and a tranquil reserve prepared to endure the worst. Many inquired with Clough, Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know. And where the land she travels from? Away, Far, far behind, is all that they can say.
Arnold echoes this refined and pensive pessimism, The world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain, And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Here is doubt deeply tinged with its native melancholy: the utterance of cultured spirits who are reluctant to leave their former habitations, and gaze back on them with infinite desire and infinite regard. From such mingled elements the most intimate strains are evoked.
They have no message for the popular mind.
Yet so long as we cherish classic forms committed to elevated and candid reflections on pregnant themes, we shall read Arnold’s “Resignation,” “Dover Beach,” and “Thyrsis.”
Though the inevitable word was not always at his command, his poetry plumbs spiritual depths which the best prose has seldom sounded.
Out of the heart of this “Age of Criticism” came Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” published when the conflict between belief and unbelief raged at its height. That saint, mystic and scholar, the late Bishop Brooke Foss Westcott, then a Cambridge Professor, gratefully acknowledged the service rendered by the poem. Its one hundred and twenty-fourth section caused many intelligent people to feel with Westcott that the long meditated work had in it the “inalienable minimum of faith which humanity cannot surrender because it is necessary to life.” It reads in part, If e’er when faith had fall’n asleep, I heard a voice, “Believe no more/’ And heard an ever breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep. A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason’s colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer’d, “I have felt.”
No, like a child in doubt and fear; But that blind clamor made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries, But, crying, knows his father near; And what I am beheld again What is, and no man understands; And out of darkness came the hands Which reach thro’ nature, moulding men.
Thus the Laureate found for himself and for multitudes besides that “Strong Son of God, Immortal Love,” without whom the world was drear indeed, but with whom its darkest phases shone in a new and a transforming light. 1 1 Cf. Gaius Glenn Atkins: Reinspecting Victorian Religion, p. 67ff.
It may be asked if we are still in Hagenbach’s “Age of Criticism.” So far as the essentials of Christianity are concerned, the answer is that criticism is on the wane, and that what may be called “The Age of Reconstruction and Restatement” is at hand. This does not mean, however, that criticism is listless and silent. On the contrary, it is energetic and vocal. But it concentrates in the main upon the failure of institutional Christianity to fulfill the fundamental ideals and aims of the New Testament Faith. Seldom indeed has any era experienced a profounder or a more widespread conviction of the significance of Jesus than our era is now experiencing. The conviction that individual, social, national and international safety and welfare are bound up in whole hearted allegiance to His example and teaching exists to-day on an unprecedented scale. If He cannot redeem humanity from its fevered ways and useless restlessness, its sin and degradation, then, for the majority, its evils are plainly beyond redemption. We are told that science has to be correlated with religion; that those facts which bear upon the theory of the nature of things must be rediscovered and restated before the claims of any religion can have concrete meaning. We are further told that, provided the result of this process is favorable to religion, it must include the service of science, and be subjected to such interpretations as science permits. It is also asserted that we have to look to an inductive philosophy, based upon scientific phenomena, for a solution of the problems of faith, and that when this philosophy and its implications are completed, we shall be able to offer men a religion, the ethical and inspirational qualities of which surpass anything that conventional religion now offers. 2 This emancipating program is as yet inchoate. But it can be predicted that unless it is to prove futile, it will have to acknowledge
2 Cf. Henry Nelson Wieman, The Wrestle of Religion with Truth. Doctor Wieman accepts as in every way adequate and justifiable Professor Whitehead’s conception of God as “that arrangement of all being which makes for concretion, but which is never completely actualized here. But God is increasingly actualized throughout an infinite progression,” p. 196f. that while the living universe is a compacted whole, Jesus is for our race the center of its cosmic unity. The truly Divine element of His nature is not to be found in the purity of His moral precepts, nor even in the uniqueness of His character, but in the glorious lucidity which the great Ideal He embodied attained in His own soul. This Ideal of absolute accord with Deity also implied that all which is finite requires a higher mediation than man or anything man achieves can bestow; and that for him true life is only to be found in a mediative personality. The relation of Christianity to science or philosophy is therefore neither one of dependence nor of opposition, but of distinction of function. Each is entitled to its own freedom; each contributes toward an ultimate harmony. Christianity is supreme in its own realm because it makes possible an ineffable fellowship between the Creator and the creature. This reasoning transfers the things of the Spirit from metaphysics to psychology, and bases their authority upon the attested experiences of believers. Neither scientific nor any other outward standards can domineer over the soul in which the Divine Mercy records its decrees of pardon and reconciliation. Christians are therefore delivered from fear of the changes attending the expansion of knowledge.
They do not have to rely upon those apologetic methods, which, though they may arrest doubt, fail to set forth the plenitude of God’s grace and truth as these are revealed in Christ Jesus.
Accurately estimated, Christian theology is not speculative; it is expressive. Its substance consists, as Schleiermacher asserts, of the facts of Christian consciousness, and its mission is to enumerate and interpret these facts without undue subserviency to the problems of philosophy or the discoveries of physical science. In the words of Professor H. R. Mackintosh, “The trust that Chirst is final can no more than the trust that He is real be produced by theoretical and constraining argument; we name Him absolute because in experience we recognize Him as the ultimate Divine answer to man’s individual and social needs.” 8 To put it bluntly, the world with which Jesus identified Himself cannot miss its appointed destiny. He will always be its lodestar; and though it may wander far, in the long last it will return to Him as the nexus of its attachment to God. Enough has been submitted here and in the previous chapters to make plain the primary significance of Jesus in the realm of religion, as thus understood.
What He said and what He did have endless worth for every intelligent being. One is aware that sin also has its social ramifications, but its tragedies begin and end in the individual. It projects in the sinner a malefic disturbance which severs him from his higher self, his proper environment, and his Maker. The final rationale for any universal religion will be that this disturbance is abolished and its ravages healed. Man is intended for God’s ownership, apart from which he cannot be truly 3 The Originality of the Christian Message, p. 187f. man. Jesus incarnated that ownership. It was His meat and drink to do the Father’s Will, and He declared He could do nothing save that which the Father commanded. He furthermore manifested the very selfhood of Deity to us, and enabled us to see ourselves as He sees us. Herein is the organic law and the living source of an ideal Divine-human relationship, made actual in steadfast trust, loyal obedience, and loving fellowship. Nor can it be seriously questioned that if every human being bore himself toward God as Jesus did, and as He invites all men to do, a regenerating transformation would ensue.
If there is any distinguishing trait in modern civilization, it is the realization that no soul lives to itself. For this reason a religion concerned with nothing more than the salvation of the individual cannot win the interest, much less the reverent adherence of mankind. If, as regards Christianity, this is “The Age of Reconstruction,” it must respond to the social compunction which has retrieved the credit of our day. And why not? The genius of the Gospel lends itself to social betterment with singular power and fitness. Its capacity in this respect makes one wonder how institutional Christianity could waste so many centuries in comparative idleness or indifference, while the field, which is the world of human aspiration, labor, suffering and wrong, awaited its latent energies. To be sure, the vision of the stream of tears and blood, ever falling darkly through the shadows of mortal travail, appeared to ittuminati like St. Francis and other mediaeval leaders. But the social viewpoint was heavily befogged by that sense of individualistic importance which still disfigures some religious propaganda. It has its rights, but their exaggeration usurps the free play of Christian humanitarianism, and reduces the Evangel to a scheme for personal rescue rather than for social restoration. So we take for granted the social force and meaning of that Gospel, and contend that if its Lord does not reign in industrial and international affairs, He cannot reign at all.
It was Immanuel Kant who taught our age its doctrine of human personality. Two of his controlling principles were that God had set before Himself a “Kingdom of ends”; and that because humanity is the center of all real values, we should treat it, whether in one’s person or that of another, as an end and never as a means. Hence the cosmic goal is at once social and moral, nor can there be any sufficient ethic which does not include both these elements. Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism, did much in his sociological system to give Kant’s concepts an organized form. He proposed an inductive study of human society based on its definite and ascertainable ways of action. For him these ways resembled those of other natural phenomena, and their specific laws were legitimate matters for observation and classification. Long before his death in 1857, however, Comte also endeavored to satisfy man’s religious requirements by demanding a real object for them and real relations between the object and man. This object he termed Le Grand fitre, “Ideal Humanity,” to which the individual should relate himself in love and adoration. In other words, the French thinker sought a religion in which the social passion should predominate over selfinterest. He held that in this predominance was the secret of personal and communal regeneration. The constitution of human nature, according to Comte, guaranteed the possibility of the change, since the heart was superior to the intellect. This theory of the superiority of feeling had already been foreshadowed by Pascal, and later, by Rousseau. But its larger implications were stressed by Schleiermacher, who plunged into unusual depths of religious thinking, and salvaged from them a theology of his own. In so doing he rejected Catholic and Protestant Scholasticism; refashioning a Christian philosophy by means of the combination in his experience of Moravian quietism, and the metaphysics of Plato, Spinoza, Kant and Schelling. His volume on Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, published in 1799, contained the marrow of his contribution to the question. Its intense subjectivity displayed a characteristic trait of the Teutonic mind. Yet we may find therein not a few of the happiest abstractions of the scholar blended with the fervent aspirations of the saint; and what it lacks in historical perspective is partly compensated by its humanistic tone. Schleiermacher maintained that the Divine life in man resided in the emotions, and was as separate from the dominion of the mind as it was from that of dogmatic authority. His mystical interpretations of idealism and social progress were interwoven with ascriptions to the preeminence of Jesus as the Mediator of the Divine immanence in man and in society.
Human consciousness of this immanence found its best exhibition, not in ecclesiastical organizations, but in the community of spiritual fellowship, animated by one Lord, one faith, and one baptism of Christ’s spirit.
Under Kant’s monarchical influence, later idealistic movements of philosophy tended to emphasize the importance of human personality. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who by his studies in German universities obtained a more intimate contact with the concepts of the famous German of Scotch descent, introduced them in Great Britain. Kant argued that “the teleology of Nature rested on a transcendental theology as the principle of systematic unity; a principle which connects all things according to universal and necessary natural laws, since they all have their origin in the absolute necessity of a single primal Being.” * Coleridge shocked the evangelical divines who were as deficient in knowledge as in sympathy, by his plea for the emancipation of orthodox doctrine from its root and branch defenders.
Thus alone, he insisted, could theological propositions be accorded a place compatible with their importance for the entire body of Christian truth and in the moral affection of mankind. Frederick W. Robertson, an enthusiastic disciple of Coleridge, declared that he preferred the enlightened views of the Sage of Highgate to the atrocious caricatures of * Critique of Judgment, p. 538. contemporary Calvinism. The practical results of this infusion of continental theological thought in the religious provincialism of Great Britain were seen in those mid- Victorian social crusades, the most significant of which was led by John Ludlow and Thomas Hughes. These laymen called themselves Christian Socialists, and among their ardent clerical allies were Frederic Denison Maurice, Julius Charles Hare, John Sterling and Charles Kingsley.
They were the promoters of The Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street, London, of which Maurice was the Principal until his death, after which Hughes succeeded him.
Comte’s theories were promulgated in England by John Stuart Mill, aided by other literary and philosophical celebrities. He proposed to substitute humanity for God as the better known object of human devotion.
He insisted that even if God existed, He would be far better satisfied with this substitution than with the formal acknowledgment of his hidden being, which current orthodoxy reckoned for righteousness. David Hume had previously expressed the same idea in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. But Mill made the familiar and remarkable concession to the original Christianity of Christ already mentioned, which virtually denatured his professed skepticism. “Religion,” he wrote, “cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity: nor even now, would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.” 5
There were a few women who fostered humanitarian enterprises in England. The notable though somewhat stormy career of Harriet Martineau cannot be recited here. But her marked intellectual gifts were nowhere more richly manifested or rewarded than in her efforts for social betterment. George Eliot was meant for a great theologian and moralist as well as a superb delineator and 8 Essays on Reliffion, p. 255. analyst of human life and society. In Romola she portrays the lurid scenes of Savonarola’s last hours, which blend the sadness of disillusionment and despair with not a few of the noble elements of martyrdom. We are here made to feel the searching force of the Apostle’s word: “Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail.” 8 In Dinah Morris, the heroine of Adam Bede, the holy, believing, compassionate spirit of early Methodism has been more perfectly presented than in the pages of the best ecclesiastical historians. 7 Theological students who would know the worth and the endurance of the workingman and field laborer of the time, and also the genesis of its social reforms, should read this novel. Frederic Harrison was the last and foremost of Positivist prophets. With him its hopes of ascendancy may be said to have ended, although the prevalence of the social emphasis in modern American theories of religion is a distinct result of Positivist influence. Nor 8 1 Corinthians 13:8.
7 Cf. T. G. Selby: The Theology of Modern Fiction, p. 16. should the sociological theories of Herbert Spencer be forgotten. Whatever may be offered in criticism of his Agnostic philosophy, it must be conceded that he compelled Englishspeaking men and women everywhere to realize that the individual and society exist in reciprocal relations with each other, and that these relations are not only physiological but ethical in their nature and functions. This, indeed, is the real thesis of his Data of Ethics. rv Psychology has since come to the support of the racial point of view. There is no field of knowledge and speculation in which the difference between traditional and modern conclusions is so sharply accented as in the science of the mind. The older language of theology described the soul as a “substance.” It was regarded as a self-contained entity linked in some inexplicable way to the body, and divided into separate qualities known as faculties, any one of which could act without reference to the rest. To-day psychologists do not use these terms or constructions. Their science has scrutinized the mysterious processes of consciousness and of self -consciousness. It has brought to light the fact that the soul or self is a development, and that as such it is physically and socially conditioned. Physiological processes profoundly affect the growth and the moral qualities- of consciousness. The character of a human being, as well as his limitations and accomplishments, are also largely determined by his environment.
Naturally the apprehension and transmission of the mission and the message of Jesus have been affected by this youthful but enterprising branch of ordered knowledge. It is not too much to say that contemporary science, philosophy, ethical speculation and theories of history or of society are being rewritten under the enforced recognition of the essentially social nature of personality. We have learned that the soul is not a special creation without any reference to preexistent conditions, but that it is a product of the life of the race as truly as is the body. We have further learned that numerous ills which handicap the individual are the inevitable results of remedial causes. Some influential thinkers insist that the preceding statement can be universalized, so that not only many, but all the ills to which human flesh is heir are amenable to healing measures. Yet the theory that the individual is a social deposit, and a merely incidental factor of the gigantic social evolution, involves him in a determinism even more despotic than that conceived by St. Augustine or Calvin.
There is a very serious danger in thus construing the problem of personal existence. It threatens to merge the man in the group to such an extent that he loses his identity, and with it his actual significance. The metaphysical theories of Bosanquet, for example, are Oriental in their fatalism rather than Occidental in their freedom. 8 Yet his doctrine of the individual and his destiny receives considerable support from not a few contem-
8 Bernard Bosanquet: The Value and Destiny of the Individual. For a searching criticism of Bosanquet’s theory, see Pringle-Pattison: The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy, Lectures XIV and XV. porary scientists and philosophers. It is still possible to show, however, that the individual is the ultimate seat of value, and that all socalled social values fulfill their purpose in the ennoblement of individual life. We have but to mention the respective Gifford Lectures on this issue by Professor Pringle-Pattison, Sir W. R. Sorley, 9 and Sir Henry Jones, 10 to corroborate the foregoing statement. Nevertheless, with the peril duly posted, the cardinal truth remains that the capacities, the obligations and the achievements of the individual are to a large extent determined by his interrelations with the social structure. We shall presently observe the remarkable way in which the Gospel of Jesus does full justice to human life, alike in its individual and social aspects. In this connection the contributions of Albrecht Ritschl marked a decisive change in our approach to the person and Gospel of the Master. It is no longer necessary to differen- 8 Moral Values and the Idea of God, Lecture V.
10 A Faith That Enquires, Lecture XVIII. tiate men as Ritschlians, since the chief contentions of the celebrated German theologian are so commonly accepted that the title has ceased to be definitive. Think of Kaftan, Harnack, Herrmann and Troeltsch in Germany; of Sabatier and Menegoz in France; of Hastings Rashdall and Alfred E. Garvie in Great Britain; of William Newton Clarke, Arthur C. McGiff ert and William Adams Brown in this country. These and other eminent Christian divines in one way or another represent RitschPs viewpoint, so that it is apparent that he has exercised an enormous influence in Protestant Christianity. 11 He was the first theologian of high standing to catch the significance of the new situation, and like most epoch-making Christian thinkers he succeeded in wresting from the Time Spirit fresh tributes for Jesus Christ.
“The rising tide of social emotion,” to use Benjamin Kidd’s phrase, swept Ritschl back
11 Cf. H. R. Mackintosh: Some Aspects of Christian Belief, Chapters VII and VIII for a sympathetic and critical estimate of Ritschlianism; also, John Baillie: The Interpretation of Religion^ p. 282ff. into the oceanic content of the New Testament itself. There he perceived anew and lifted into clarity the three organic concepts of Fatherhood, Sonship and Brotherhood, which found authoritative expression in the Kingdom idea. The renewed study of the mind of the Master, on the lines laid down by Bitschl and by those who developed his teachings, has given a marked emphasis to the message of Christianity, not for the individual alone, but for the individual in social relationships. This is brought out in the thought of the Christian community, which is a fellowship of believers inspired by the consciousness of Christ, who for them is at once unique and supreme.
Ritschl’s bold religious positivism, inherited from Luther, Calvin and Schleiermacher, assumed that the spiritual experience of believers is the heart of reality which truly explains everything else. From its data Christian thinkers may construct the total view of the universe in terms of a spiritual idealism, which magnifies the redemptive purpose of the love of God in Jesus Christ, for the moral organization of humanity in the universal Kingdom of God.
Professor Josiah Royce, one of America’s noblest philosophers, perceived the value of the Ritschlian method, and its agreement in a measure with his own thinking. That which Jesus meant by “the Kingdom of Heaven,” St. Paul by “the Body of Christ,” and St. John the Seer by “the New Jerusalem,” was for Doctor Royce “the Beloved Community” or the Community of the Loyal. He conceived it as the end and aim of the cosmic process, a Brotherhood wide as the world in its command, fixed as the stars in the “loyalty” which is its integrating force. Jesus is its everlasting center. His death on the cross gave supreme and authentic expression to that “loyalty to loyalty,” which is the ultimate law of the race and its sure path to the highest good. One of Doctor Royce’s “practical maxims” is an epitome of wide areas of modern thinking upon the whole issue. He says that men and women should “judge every social device, every proposed reform, every national and every local enterprise by the one test, Does this help towards the coming of the universal Community?” 12 If his maxim had social and political power commensurate with its ethical authority it could regenerate the life we know.
Ritschl and Royce, however, but accelerated a tendency already prevalent among Christian leaders. So far back as 1865 Sir James Seeley published in England his Ecce Homo, in which Jesus was presented as one who possessed a boundless “enthusiasm” for humanity. To disseminate this “enthusiasm” he created a commonwealth that “claims unlimited selfsacrifice on the part of its members, and demands that the interest and safety of the whole shall be set by each member above his own interest, and above all private interests whatever.” 13 Seeley’s volume was described by Doctor Marcus Dods as a boon to the Church because of its restatement of the halfforgotten truth that what Jesus gave to man- 12 The Problem of Christianity, Vol. II, p. 430f.
18 Ecce Homo, Chapter XXIV. kind had significance for the here and now. The core of Seeley’s contention was repeated by Matthew Arnold. After showing that the Old Testament’s governing ideal is personal and public righteousness, the author of Literature and Dogma insisted that Jesus accepted this ideal, gave it its concrete content, realized it in His own person, and showed others how to realize it by obedience and love.
“Nothing will do,” said Arnold, “except righteousness, and no other conception of righteousness will do except Jesus’ conception of it.” 14
Bishop Westcott, already acknowledged as a worthy successor in Durham’s historic episcopate to Joseph Butler and John Barber Lightfoot, published in 1895 a volume of Addresses discussing Christianity and the collective principle. He pointed out that the Evangel of Jesus is concerned with the individual and also the society of which he is an integral part.
“The thoughts... that men are ’one man in Christ,’ sons of God and brethren suffering 14 Literature and Dogma, p. 219. and rejoicing together; that each touches all and all touch each other with an inevitable influence; that as we live by others we can find no rest till we live for others are fundamental thoughts... which the Christian teacher is empowered and bound to make effective under the conditions of modern life.” 1B Doctor J.
Scott Lidgett, a disciple of Wesley and of Westcott, and a theologian of outstanding merits, has given further cogency to this interpretation of the social Gospel by showing that the principle of the atonement is the perfect expression of the filial and fraternal spirit which is creative of social progress. Divine sonship is at once the reason, the obligation and the inspiration of human brotherhood. Its fuller realization has immediate effects upon all human interests, and orders them in conformity to the Mind of Christ. The welfare of mankind is thus assured only as we carry out Christ’s teaching of service, which is to be ungrudgingly rendered in the freedom of the sons of God, and in behalf of their fellow men, 1B Addresses, p. 231ff. even at the cost of the self-sacrifice which is the dictate of love and righteousness. 18
Enough has been said to show that the Christian preacher is justified in rejecting the pious slogan that the Churches have “nothing to do but to save souls.” Jesus is in open conflict with all palpable injustice and wrong, whether personal or communal, national or international. “The Son of God goes forth to war” against the unfair distribution of life’s benefits and opportunities. He requires that flagrant violations of Christian brotherhood shall end, since they afflict the very soul of the Church Universal, and do despite to the Spirit of His grace. The fearless and equitable application of the New Testament teachings to the actualities of morals, education, politics, business, peace and war is therefore one of the essential features of the minister’s program.
18 Cf. J. Scott Lidgett: The Spiritual Principle of the Atonement, p. 414ff.